The World Economic Outlook – a bi-annual publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- released in October 2020 has anticipated that the economic progress made by the countries since the 1990s to reduce poverty would be turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, economic disparity would rise too in the post-COVID world because the crisis has disproportionately impacted women, informal sector workers and people with...
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Employment, finally an election issue -Santosh Mehrotra and JK Parida
-The Hindu Several myths persist about job creation, which can misguide policymaking Jobs are rarely far from the minds of citizenry. Politicians woke up to this fact in the run-up to the Bihar Assembly elections. It is for the first time that unemployment has become a big issue in an election. This is not surprising. Rising unemployment The economy had been slowing for nine quarters prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Before the 2019 Lok...
More »Farming GM crops, employment fund -- what govt panel has suggested to create 20 cr jobs in 5 yrs -Neelam Pandey
-ThePrint.in A Working Group of Ministers on employment generation and skill development submitted its report to PM Modi, making 63 suggestions across 18 sectors for job creation. New Delhi: Looking to create 20 crore job opportunities in the next five years, a government-appointed Working Group of Ministers (WGoM) has suggested allowing farming of Genetically Modified (GM) maize and soybean crops, private bikes for ride-sharing, expediting road projects and starting new ones, among...
More »MGNREGA: Today and tomorrow -Sunita Narain
-Down to Earth The programme can provide a safety net for the poor, not just in COVID-19 times, but for times to come In these darkest days of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) — when jobs and economies have collapsed — 56 million households got work in the past three months and these jobs provided relief. This was under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which perhaps is the...
More »Can raising the approved labour budget from 280.76 crore person-days to 306.6 crore person-days help the unskilled returnee migrants who prefer MGNREGA to Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan?
Although social activists and concerned economists demanded at least Rs. 1 lakh crore to be earmarked in favour of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Finance Minister in her budget speech on 1st February allocated only Rs.61,500 crore to it for the financial year 2020-21. As compared to the fund spent on MGNREGA in 2019-20 (i.e. revised estimate of Rs.71,001.81 crore), the amount set aside for the...
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